Earth Defense Force 6 – PS5 Review

Earth Defense Force 6 is a third-person action shooter and is developed by Japanese coders Sandlot.  It’s the latest in a long series of games that have a true cult following and we count ourselves as fully paid up members of that cult.  But now that the series is two decades in, can it still wow us like it once did?

Our journey with the EDF (EDF! EDF!) started, like many, with Earth Defense Force 2017 on the Xbox 360.  A game that tapped into our love of monster movies but also mass destruction in games.  I still remember the first time I played it.  I had a rocket launcher equipped and could see a tall building in the far reaches of the draw distance.  Will this rocket take out that building?  It did.  Holy shit!  Giant ants and fully destructible environments?  SIGN ME UP.

And that game just got better and better across its fifty or so levels.  Spiders, robots, giant Godzilla things and in numbers that made it seem like you’d punched your 360 in the gut.  The sheer insanity of it plus all of the barking mad Japanese humour.  It was a true joy and remains a classic.

Earth Defense Force 2025 came next and our crew of ant-haters put hundreds of hours into that one.  This reviewer mained the Fencer class, just dropping destruction wherever I could, much to the chagrin of my co-op buddies, and we all eventually maxed out the achievements on it.  It was actually the game that cured me of my achievement hunting addiction.  It was 600+ hours.  I could have learned Italian or some shit.

The switch from Xbox to Sony then happened and when Earth Defense Force 4.1 came out which was a remix of sorts of 2025.  It was great but we weren’t keen to try for the Platinum knowing the grind that would come.  And then there was Earth Defense Force 5 which kept much of the same DNA as 2025/4.1 (in terms of the structure and the playable classes) but rebooted the series, giving a new story/timeline and a few new monsters to gawp at.  It was great but also SO VERY LONG and all too familiar.  So, with EDF6 we’re looking for real change now.  Make EDF great again type stuff.

Well, the first impressions aren’t great.  The menu interface is a befuddling mess (getting an online lobby is more of a chore than it needs to be too), the visuals don’t feel particularly upgraded (despite the option for performance vs quality), the classes are the same as before and the tutorial mission is just about as rubbish as it gets in a series that is known for fumbling them.  Follow that up with a dozen missions taken straight out of the EDF play book and you’d be forgiven for feeling disappointed early on.

Alas, the feeling continues throughout the game.  Like it’s all very EDF but almost too much so.  The giant ants, spiders, wasps, red ants, wood lice, frog guys no longer have the power to surprise you but the new enemy types aren’t particularly inspiring.   There are new flying drone types, new robot things (that don’t look as good as Hectors), Kruul (tall shielded aliens) and new enemy structures but nothing here will wow you at all.  And the fact that they’ve upped the already stupidly high mission count is ridiculous too.  There are 147 of them and not only do they all feel kind of repetitive at times but actually many of them feel like copies or remixes of those from EDF 5.  And you’ve also got a time-travel aspect to the story that means you’ll be playing a few of these missions a few times, albeit it with some variation, including the awful tutorial mission.

It’s as if the joke just isn’t funny anymore.  The silly dialogue now just grates, the carnage now just feels like part of the grind and you still won’t use 95% of the weapons you find (although, as ever, it’s pretty satisfying when you do find a more useful weapon).   Vehicles are also just as miserable to use as ever.

But, with all that said, this is still EDF god damn it and there are positives.  Basically, if you want to stand with your back to the sea and your gun facing dozens and dozens of enemies, the carnage that EDF offers just isn’t something you can get elsewhere.  And when you join up with other players in co-op, it all starts to feel like fun again.  I spent days grinding in solo play but as soon as I got on with some the boys from the 2025 campaign, things became a lot more enjoyable.

It’s just a shame that the game is so big as it just takes forever to get anything achieved.  The core gameplay loop of clearing a level, grabbing all the crates, marginally improving your firepower and then doing it all again is okay but when you stretch it across 147 levels, it starts to annoy.  EDF always had the grind but it wasn’t just about the grind.  Now that the flavour has worn off with the dialogue and level design, the grind just adds misery, not fun.

Thankfully, there are some quality of life improvements.  Having a separate equipment function mapped to R1 is great.  It’s so nice to be able to fling grenades when your guns are out of ammo.  And the new damage indicator is a great feature especially when using weapons from range where you’d otherwise not know if they are hitting.  Also, you now get to keep half of your weapon and armour pick ups if you fail a mission and missions are auto-cleared on any difficulty lower than the one you finish them on.  Neat little touches that’ll take a least a tiny bit of the sting out of EDF‘s ever-present grind.

Visually the game still looks impressive at times but the frame rate, even on Performance Mode, takes multiple hits on the denser levels.  That’s just what happens when you ask a console to render enormous ants in enormous numbers but we were hoping the PS5 would take all this in its stride.  Especially as there is a PS4 version.  Maybe that’s the issue and Sandlot need to leave the PS4 players behind to focus on delivering the best EDF ever.  But instead what we get here is a cross-generational one that is hamstrung by the past in more ways than one.

There are still some great levels here and the joy of figuring out how to beat them when your DPS just doesn’t cut it is still the thing that EDF is best at.  But, as a whole package, this feels like an expanded, but not deluxe, version of EDF5 with just a few token improvements to attempt to justify the fifty quid price tag.  And, as such, it’s hard to not just feel a little let down by the whole thing.  As good as it is, maybe EDF just hasn’t got the power to impress anymore.